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And yet this is completely irrelevant because the news media failed utterly at its job anyway.

Gossip and personality issues were covered FAR more than policy issues. Fact-checks about who said what or grabbed whose whatever are one part of an election, but the actual policies being voted on matter several orders of magnitude more than matters of personality.

Even Trump's personality as a bullshit artist matter far less than what he intended to do, because as we can see he said all of it. He also said the opposite and everything in between, but had the policies been compared and studied, it would have been apparent what would happen.

So the dumpster fire is on... well I guess this time it's on capitalism since the only reason all of this bullshit happened is because ignoring policy is the more profitable choice and none of the news media can ignore profit, or at the very least survival, at the expense of some romantic idea of "journalistic integrity". Hell, even doctors were quack bullshit artists for most of our history, until science overrode every other concern by making it more profitable to know what you are doing, rather than being a good salesman.

We need a free market for most of our needs but some roles are simply incompatible with free-for-all "if you can sell it it's legal even if it kills a lot of people". We're shooting ourselves in the foot with our for-profit news media and all-the-bullshit-goes politics.

This is becoming the mother of all examples for the Dunning-Kruger effect. To think that someone who doesn't have any qualifications for executive political office could select people with qualifications he clearly does not have is just...

Ah to hell with it, fetal position it is. At least actual dumpster fires are bright and hot. This particular figurative dumpster fire is just... cold and wet and very depressing.

Which is a huge industry, worth billions, with an audience in the tens of millions in right-wing radio, Fox News and other hate-focused sensationalist garbage.

This is what started it all. This division was all started because it made people rich, filthy rich even. Right-wing loudmouths have been calling Liberals literally evil for decades, convincing tens of millions of people that there is a vast shadowy group of people that actually wants to destroy their country and convert your kids to homosexuality, or something. It's completely insane, it has no connection to reality whatsoever.

They they hatched their Chicken Supreme in Trump, the monster they created but can't control. But they can't hear through their thick walls lined with money so they don't care.

Years of right-wing radio did this. They have tens of millions of listeners and nearly all they do is demonize the "other side". It's hate radio and it laid the groundwork for the current dumpster fire of "we won, you need to shut up".

And I'm sure the right-wing radio hosts who reach tens of millions of angry listeners who just collectively won their personal super bowl will be calm and rational about the whole thing.

Clinton requesting a recount and overturning the outcome of the election would lead to civil unrest, possibly lots of violence.

Stein doing so? Who the hell knows? Chances are slim to none that the outcome of the election changes, but Clinton herself should ideally not even be photographed during this period of time, catch up on Netflix or something else instead, in order to keep things partly under control.

I can't see the controversy. Someone who happens to be a big figure in alt-right, whatever that is if not fascism without a mustache, did say pretty much that. It seems an appropriate topic and summary of the discussion. How much place is there anyway, 30 characters?

Unless there is a very forceful rejection of it. Something which hasn't been made so far in Congress.

McCain destroyed his reputation during his presidential run. Candidate McCain lost his spine and hasn't recovered for it. He truly and thoroughly sucked during the months he spent as a prostitute. He even made a mockery of what a maverick politician could be.

This is a damn good way to grow back his spine with adamentium. If he can go down as the man who made torture politically unacceptable, he will be remembered as a honorable man, despite all his groveling and accepting Palin as his gotcha card.

It's quite well known that the typical reaction to having lots of money is "that's plenty enough" and no one of wealth has ever tried to accumulate more.

Or is it the opposite? Oh yeah, it absolutely is.

Money is a powerful drug because it buys you everything you could ever want. It should be treated as a mental disorder of the addictive-compulsive sort. Greed by some is the main reason why most people can't have nice things. It'd be great if we'd do something to at least minimize the harm it can do in the wrong hands.

Reading the comments, it's more apt to say they are suckers. Trump is a con artist. He's done well with it for decades and people come back for more, even with hundreds saying they were swindled by him. Why does anyone listen to Deepak Chopra when his word salads are just as cringy as Trump's? They're just good at creating the illusion of being credible. They both rely on emotional content to override critical thinking.

Intelligence has almost no bearing on falling for con artists and skilled influencers. People fall for pyramid schemes, buy pseudoscience woo products, get conned by various financial schemes or trust truly bizarre ideas because it fits with their personal experience.

The key takeaway was "I don't trust all these politicians who tell me they want to help me so I'll trust this non-politician who tells me he wants to help me", even though there is absolutely nothing to back Trump's ability to do any of it. He even made some promises that are completely at odds with reality, or even at odds with other promises he made. But he made them with confidence. Although the line with arrogance is largely subjective and Clinton's arrogance was mentioned several times so it's hard to place this reason in context.

Sick people fall for snake oil and magical cures all the time. Hell, even healthy people fall for magic pills. These people felt something was wrong with their lives and decided "what the hell, even a fake cure can't be worse than the disease".

It comes down to critical thinking. Many people who are highly intelligent have little to none and many people of below average intelligence have tons of it. The abundance of fake news during the election cycle made it abundantly clear that critical thinking is not at the level it should be. One part of it is with just how much lying and corruption there is in politics and in how much it creates issues with trust, with being lied to constantly because there are no consequences to it. As much as people would want to be critical of what they hear, they have been conned so many times by so many people that it's impossible to be objective.

Imagine Obama having been married three times and having children from different wives and a trophy wife from Eastern Europe while living in a gold-plated penthouse on top of a skyscraper with his name written on it.

The complete lack of consequences for starting the Iraq war is all the proof anyone needs.

Deliberately starting a war on false pretenses is just about the worst thing anyone can do. No consequences to anyone involved responsible and no sustained outrage. Hell, the people who did it were re-elected even harder.

Attacking gays is easy. Just open the pie hole and let go of your grasp on reality.

Fixing the economy and fulfilling unrealistic promises to bring back an imaginary period of time is really freaking hard.

There is absolutely nothing about Trump that indicates he intends on working on hard things. Nothing about his life that speaks of "likes to solve complicated issues". He's in over his head and is surrounded by people who would do anything to hold on to political power they know they should never have gotten close to.

And since the most likely explanation of why they hate homosexuality is because they struggle with it themselves, it's pretty safe to repeat it. It's not necessarily the explanation, but it's by far the most logical one.

Who seriously thinks so obsessively about something that shouldn't affect their lives other than people who live with it? The bible thing is not a good explanation since there's so much cherry-picking with adultery, pre-marital sex and shellfish, among others.

The most annoying thing about this is that "git gud" is not possible when lag or a glitch is what killed you. You can adapt to better players by trying what they did to kill you. You just can't beat network issues. Or maybe you can, some seem to be OK with it. Maybe the problem is a typical network configuration that only a % of players have? But it just seems to vary so much between games.

If Bungie wants players to "git gud" as well, they better improve the consistency of their game because when half the time you don't know what you could have done differently to win an exchange, what's the point? It's too frustrating. Luckily, Overwatch hits all the right points for this. So satisfying to have control over the outcome of your game.

We really ought to find a word that could properly convey the scope of the warming. Something regarding the fact that it's happening all around the globe as an average. Like not inside of it or around it but on its surface. It would be great if that word had the double meaning of on the surface of a globe, but also an expression used to describe the whole of our civilization.

The problem is in not accepting that not voting is a statement that means none of the choices are actually any good and that the system has fundamental flaws that lead to nearly half the population saying "all your choices are bad for me".

It's a problem that is shared in every modern democracy. The choices are awful but no one has any solution yet. It's like choosing between a doctor who peddles homeopathy and healing crystals and another who thinks all illnesses are the result of your own stupid choices. You'll still be sick in the end, but you'll be damned if you'll get insulted on top of it.

This time, it really did came down to this very simple joke that was not supposed to be taken as a model of things to come but here we are anyway: "your shit's all retarded".

You can't tell a population where nearly half believe that the end of the world is coming that evil liberals are actually right now at this very moment enacting every single item of their gay baby-eating agenda without people coming out with reality dysfunction as an outcome.

Right-wing radio and television is the cause of all this shit. All of it. They own this mess and as long as they hypnotize tens of millions of people, there is little to no hope of fixing the root cause of this dumpster fire.

It would require Facebook to look at millions of dollars, hard to know exactly how much but possibly hundreds of millions, and say "nah" out of pure good will (or moral fiber, hahahahahahahaha, sorry).

Facebook, a large company with thousands of employees and shareholders, would need to work against its own short term interests to implement this change. I have no doubt the code is already working, they simply did not activate it because of the money issue and the fear of backlash, as it's obvious that these fake news overwhelmingly target right-wing beliefs and enthusiasts of pseudo-science like homeopathy, chemtrails and anti-vaccination.

It's necessary to censor the obvious bullshit, but too polarizing and could lead to a severe backlash from right-wing opinion makers with tens of millions of listeners to call for a boycott of Facebook. The backlash would be severe and it would likely cost Facebook much more than even the loss of revenue from these fake stories.

The main problem is that they want it to fail where it's not important to them and they want it to work only on what they like.

They want to have their cake and it too. They want federal subsidies to help them but they don't want to pay taxes. They don't want to pay for abortions but they can't accept don't want to pay for war. They want clean air but they think the EPA is useless. They want quality education, as long as it teaches what they like.

It's fine that they get theirs. But politics is about compromise. Every decision is a compromise on all others, if only because of limited budgets.

The people smashing things in protests are the ultimate tools of the law and order conservatives. They make it possible for genuine peaceful protests to be branded illegitimate because of their actions.

Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage have millions of listeners. Combined audiences for right-wing opinion is in the tens of millions.

Right-wing manufactured outrage radio is a huge business. It's probably worth several billions. They'll never stop peddling bullshit because they realized that the worst, most outrageous bullshit is what sells the best.

In a deeply ironic twist, "I saw it on the Internet" is now actually more likely to be fake than it was in the 90's when people used to say "what the hell is the Internet and how can you take people in their underwear seriously?"

Trump even said pretty much just that one time, can't remember where I saw it (latest Last week tonight?). He was challenged for an obvious lie and just replied "I just repeated what I saw on the Internet, I don't know if it's true".

Critical thinking skills are an absolute necessity moving forward if we are to get out of this mess.

The problem isn't really being "post-fact" or something like that. It's more like "there are facts but they are drowned out by oceans of bullshit because it pays to peddle bullshit". Facts are still there, far and few. It's the amount of bullshit that surpassed the ability to filter them out.

We need to find a way for truth and foresight to be lucrative, or at least an asset. We need objective truth to be considered a virtue, something tangible, not some bias that is just as valid as things that are completely made up because there's money to be made.

In their news feeds, Republicans see the country running with blood and flames from those nightly riots.

The people smashing things in protests are ironically the biggest tools of the law and order conservatives since they make peaceful protests illegitimate by association to their violence. No amount of sane people denouncing rioters can change the fact that right-wing radio will scream about violent liberals until their hoarse throats become a pre-existing condition to deny them health insurance.

They won't be on the receiving because as much as there is talk about both parties being the same, they are absolutely not.

They know that liberals are always looking to compromise, even when the compromise is between two options they hate. They can always count on liberals being the responsible adults and work hard to fix the problem and never try to punish those responsible.

Democrats caved in on massive obstruction from the Republicans, who were given the keys for the entire government despite basically refusing to do their job.

Republicans are fine with all of this because they will never be the victims of it. They will feel they are victimized by it, but they will never actually be. And GOP leaders know this very well.

How can anyone think mass deportation would not involve camps to process them?

It still depends on whether or not Trump will try to go aggressive on this, but he said he would do a first massive push of, what, 2-3 million? You do not process 2-3 million people for deportation from regular field offices.

They won't be death camps and there may even be relative peace and order. But there will definitely be camps with lots of armed guards, lots of people, lots of anger, lots of anxiety, lots of things that will go wrong.

Maybe Trump will tone it down, but I don't think his base would appreciate. They will deny anything bad that happens in those camps as the illegals' fault and they should not have been there in the first place. They will argue that since they are not citizens, they do not have protection under the constitution. It will all be fine since they won't be personally affected, or not too much anyway. Except for food prices and a shortage of construction workers, but who needs those?

Wherever that leads, who knows? But there will most likely be deportation camps. I don't know if internment is the correct word, but it sounds like a distinction without much a difference.

Right-wing radio did this. They found a lucrative market for manufactured outrage and the more outrageous they are, the more money they make.

They won't stop. They need to be stopped. But the only way they could stop is by realizing the damage they are causing and stop on their own. You can't censor them, it violates the 1st amendment. You can't educate against them, facts are irrelevant to their audience. You can't appeal to their conscience, they make too much money to care.

They are the reason we can't have nice things. They deserve to be shamed, but I'm not sure they are capable of shame in their mansions and gilded bed sheets.

He probably did not read those newspapers, thus he's not lying about the fact that he thinks there was a blackout because the generally accepted definition is to knowingly say something untrue. A blackout is what he saw, by not looking.

So obviously the blame is on the news. Or some news, since right-wing radio is the only source of daily "news" for tens of millions of Americans. And it told these people that the MSM had a blackout on reporting about the Clinton emails, which in their case was deliberate lying.

Then again the same news organisations basically abandoned their duties on Iraq, on neglecting to write about the economic troubles of the majority (the economy is doing great! look at all the money rich people are making!) and other important topics in their search for profitability.

Of course that same person would scream how wrong the MSM news are about these things since they heard on the radio that Saddam Hussein flew two of the 9/11 planes by remote control and that rich people getting richer is actually good for poor people so... yeah something needs to change about having credible fact-based news.

The decades-long right-wing shock "news" and opinion probably deserves the biggest blame. They created an environment in which truth was irrelevant and poisoned the ability of the actual credible news stories to be made as relevant as they are important.

Glenn Beck talked about having severe neurological symptoms because of an untreated condition during the years he was raving mad on Fox News. On /r/the_donald, the response was how Beck recently lost his mind and he used to make more sense, in the comments on an article talking about how Beck was suffering from an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality for all these years. Can't make that stuff up...

That was my feeling as well before I saw what has-been celebrities charge for appearances. People who truly could not even begin to provide anything useful out of the sums of money they receive. Kardashians, Charlie Sheen, Little Sebastian, etc.

Many people and companies simply have that much money to spend on having someone famous come along and hang out. The rates for even people who had one big role in a sitcom two decades ago are just ridiculous. People pay to hang out with famous people. Simple as that.

It's a celebrity appeal for 90% of the price. There's probably a genuine 10% "totally a bribe" for some people, but even rich people have the googlies for famous people and just want the cred that goes with Instagramming "yeah totally hung out with the former PM of the UK" if that's what they're into.

And all of the public speakers just think that the price is justified because "that's what they're willing to pay" because that's what it is: the privileges of fame.

I don't doubt Clinton was influenced by metaphorical trucks of money. But I highly doubt they were nearly as high-profile as public speaker fees. If you want to influence a politician, you don't send out invitations to the meeting. You do it like they have always done in: in fucking private and no one speaks of it. It happens on a regular basis, but it sure as hell doesn't involve the public speaker circuit.

We're just going to build billions of mechanical bee drones that can be controlled remotely from large distances. There will only be a single back-door for government agencies so to control them there's nothing to worry about.

I don't understand this attitude of spite. I'll do this specifically because you showed me it's good for me. This is a really fucked up attitude and it's a badge of honor for millions of people, fans of right-wing radio, to say "fuck it" to anything that can demonstrably improve the world.

Right-wing radio has managed to convince tens of millions of Americans that the people who want to make the world a better place actually, deeply want to destroy it. That simply can't lead to any good. It's not meant to work, it's no surprise that it doesn't.

Good on them, numbers are about the opposite as I'd estimate in Canada, where there is little to continue, as there is barely any actual care to begin with.

Just that first step of actually not insulting people with a psychologist of the gaps (i.e. we don't know what it is therefore it's your fault) argument would go a long way towards making this illness bearable.

Any Norwegians interesting in talking about their experience? Most of the experiences I've seen were in either US, UK or Canada.

One thing that was repeated many times pointed that out very well: Trump wants to make the election about Trump, Clinton wants to make the election about Trump; if the election is all about Trump, he'll win.

It would have been a good strategy for Clinton to have a few ads with Trump's own words. Making nearly all of them and completely ignoring her platform was major league dumb. "Just go to my website, you can read it all there, I don't need to explain it".

She truly did have to explain it. In fact, it's all she had to do to win and she thought it was unnecessary.